


The Queen's Little Helper

by Thimblerig



Series: Scenes From A War [8]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Gen, Milady did not sign on as anyone's fairy godmother she wants this made very clear, Minor and Inadvertent Voyeurism, Prompt Fic, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 05:53:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12426363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: Milady smiled. “Oh dear,” she said, “am I interrupting a private moment?”





	The Queen's Little Helper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YoureMyTicket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YoureMyTicket/gifts).



> Prompt Fic for YoureMyTicket
> 
> _...how about post-s3 Milady walking in on and/or noticing Aramis and Anne holding hands, flirting, kissing or whatever when she's come to report to Anne and Milady (whist gagging) wonders how it is they ever got away with and continue to get away with being together. So something lighthearted and on the humorous side and can be one time or multiple incidents..._
> 
>  Thank you for your patience waiting for this fill, and I'm sorry I couldn't get in the part about bedroom advice. I hope you like it...

“I want you in Amiens,” Anne, the Queen, said crisply, hands flat and still on an escritoire inlaid with rare woods and mother-of-pearl. Fine lace flowed from soft blue sleeves and draped around her slender wrists. One finger, bound in the metal of a heavy gold signet, stirred ever-so-slightly.

The woman who had once been an Anne herself, and now was most comfortable with an epithet, always and ever _my lady,_ waited patiently.

Through the high windows of the Queen’s private study, gardeners raked red and gold leaves off the lawn. No slip of paper was forthcoming, slid across the writing desk accompanied by an imperious blue stare.

“Whom am I to kill?” Milady prompted.

“Nobody,” said the Queen. A crease formed between her fair eyebrows. “I hope. There is trouble with the cloth guilds in the city. And a claim of heresy. The reports of the situation are… contradictory... and I have noticed that my advisors have a tendency to tell me what they think I want to hear. Even -” her cheeks coloured prettily - “the First Minister. At times.”

“It is difficult to be charming with cold, hard truths,” Milady said drily.

“I want your eyes on the city,” the Queen said. “You worked under Richelieu for years: you must understand politics. And you don’t want me to like you.”

“On the contrary, you are the one woman in France I am desperate to please, O esteemed patroness.”

“You can please me with the truth, then. As you see it.” Ah, there was the glint of blue, eyes like drill bits tipped with sapphire… “Unless you consider yourself incapable?”

Milady tsked softly. “Please don’t goad me in such a simplistic way. You send, I do, that’s all there is to it. You are… quite sure you don’t want me to kill someone?”

“I’m trying not to treat death lightly,” the Queen said, her eyes flicking down to her fine-boned hands. She looked up again. “So I need to know what precisely is going on.”

“This is a test,” Milady said.

“Of course.”

Milady curtsied deeply, and left. As she wended through the secret ways, the hidden paths of the palace, she wondered: if the Queen blushed even referring to her old lover by _title,_ however was this going to stay secret?

 

**

 

Because it would never do for an employer to get too confident, Milady gave her report in the nursery, slipping through the guard cordon with ease and walking up behind the woman who, in a pool of her own skirts, sat on an expensive rug playing with small gilt horses and soldiers with the King.

It was young Louis who saw her first, over his mother’s shoulder, his dark eyes widening and his mouth forming a little O. Queen Anne spun around, her body between the assassin and the child, with a hand diving for a slit in her skirt through which an enterprising woman might reach a weapon. (Good girl.)

“Peace,” Milady said, grinning. “I may be a monster, but I’m _your_ monster. Would you like a bedtime story, Little King?”

The boy nodded. He had his father’s long dark eyelashes but his nose and chin, as far as could be determined through the plumpness of a child, were all Anne’s. The Queen’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she inclined her head.

“Once upon a time,” Milady began, seating herself also on the thick rug by the toy men, “there was a knight called Raimund who travelled through the bitter wilderness and he stopped by a pure spring where dwelt a fair maiden, Melusine. And Raimund loved her, he loved her so, and asked her to marry him. Because she loved him, she agreed. _But,_ she said, _you must agree to this one rule. Every Saturday I will bathe alone in my room and you must not watch as I do it._ Of course he agreed. So Melusine went home with him and they had many children and also, for she was clever and wise, she built many castles for his domain… What happiness!”

The boy nodded solemnly. “Perhaps we’ll end it there for tonight,” Milady said, “where everybody keeps their promises and happiness abounds. I have another story for your mother,” she added, “but it will take some time to tell.”

“A little later, then,” said the Queen, very composed.

A shuffle of a foot on the floor and she turned to see the First Minister standing in the doorframe, in a peacock blue suit and snowy linen. His face was nearly as white as his shirt.

Milady smiled. “Oh dear,” she said, “am I interrupting a private moment?”

“Aramis!” the little boy exclaimed, trotting over and leaping into his Minister’s arms. The man’s face softened into honeycomb, looking down at the boy. As did Anne’s, watching them… Christ, how did those two _manage,_ in the wolf-pack of court?

Later, when the doting couple had lulled their child to sleep and Milady with _great intestinal fortitude_ had refrained from gagging _at any point,_ visibly, that is, she told the pair that helmed the nation a longer drier tale of rival weaving guilds in Amiens, a shortage in raw wool, three noble families jockeying for power, and an ambitious bishop. She knew who she’d murder, who seduce to sort it all out, but she decided, magnanimously, to let them figure it out themselves.

She didn’t - also magnanimously - discuss what else she’d found in Amiens, a rather silly woman named Pauline who lived on a quiet, tree-lined street, on a small but comfortable stipend from the First Minister of France…

 

**

 

It wasn’t that she _owed_ Aramis anything. Quite the contrary - he still had a prison-rescue on account.

 _You shouldn’t take death so lightly,_ he’d said to her once, with bruises on his wrists from the chains and bruises elsewhere, she could tell, from how he moved. The man was a fool and she’d nearly abandoned him then, to find his own way out in the tunnels under the Bastille. But she needed to be paid and so forth and so on. It had niggled at her, that phrase, as she talked with Athos, as she asked Athos to come away with her. _You shouldn’t take death so lightly._

It was rather pleasant to keep a First Minister in her pocket. She wondered how often he blushed, when the Queen his mistress was petting him (charmingly, no doubt).

So she kept what she’d learned of his background private and maybe the Queen, who was also Anne, heard the warning not to pry in Melusine’s story and maybe she didn’t - it didn’t have to be Milady’s problem and so it was not.

 

**

 

“Just kill me now,” she muttered under her breath, thunking her forehead against the dark wood of the secret cabinet in - she kept wanting to call it Richelieu’s - the First Minister’s office.

Through the peephole in the wood she could see the Queen, in a white dress she favoured for the summer heat, its floating gauze skirts spread out where she perched on the great desk. Her cheeks showed pink, and she was giggling. Her Minister’s hands - still capable and strong as the soldier he used to be - were on her waist. The Queen giggled again, she learned forward to -

Milady glanced quickly to the side where, sharing her quiet darkness, Athos stood motionless as a man turned to stone, his eyes wild.

“Breathe,” she suggested.

His chest heaved convulsively then stopped again, stiff as a rusted lock.

“It isn’t _actually_ treason anymore,” she murmured helpfully.

Athos stared at her in horror.

He was well fed, she noticed, if plainly dressed, with clear skin and the pouches under his eyes quite vanished. There was a plain gold band on one finger, brilliant even in the shadows.

If the Queen and her fancy-man took this elsewhere… she might actually have to _talk_ to her ex-husband.

 _Do carry on,_ she thought to the lovers, and sighed.

 

**

 

It wasn’t the best weather, when they opened the new public fountain, the traces of sunshine long driven away by light clouds spitting water on the crowds.

Even so, the Queen was radiant in the soft lavenders and greys of her stately dress, as she watched the workmen lay the last stone. With pink cheeks and summer-sky eyes she bit her lower lip absently as the fountain was connected to a new aqueduct built to supply clean water to a number of aristocratic houses and also, coincidentally, the impoverished quarter where they now all stood.

The crowd, labourers and the lowest of low-bourgeois, watched her warily - still suspicious of the late King’s whims, of the Spanish Queen-Dowager. Already a Parisian water-carrier had set his buckets down in disgust, muttering dire imprecations of the intrusion on his trade.

A low coughing gurgle from the ground beneath their feet and water began to spurt from the fountain, slowly at first, then gaining strength. A few people dotted through the crowd began to cheer. They were agents with Milady’s coins in their pockets - some things needed helping along - but the rest of the crowd took it up with a more sincere enthusiasm. The water-carrier snarled and his grey-haired wife clipped him over the ear. It was well enough.

Milady glanced again at the Queen, to see how she was taking the spectacle, and swore to herself.

The woman, unconsciously, reached back to hold her First Minister’s hand where he stood a little behind her and he took it, gently stirring his thumb over her fingers as they stood together, watching the fountain.

Milady sighed and melted back into the shadows.

Not an ounce of subtlety in the pair of them.

**Author's Note:**

> // I was having trouble reconciling “Go, kill this person for me,” with fluffy interrupted kissing scenes, so I expanded Milady’s duties somewhat.
> 
> // The Fairy Melusine - a figure of folklore familiar in parts of Europe, including France, for centuries. When Raimund spied on her in the bath, he saw that she was half-woman, half-dragon, and the marriage pretty much died. I thought the story might resonate with Milady. While the dragony bit is very memorable, Melusine is also associated with _prosperity,_ so long as one doesn’t invade her privacy. 
> 
> Ref here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melusine 
> 
> // I thought I read somewhere that one of the public works of Cardinal Mazarin (Anne’s historical First Minister/suspected husband) was building a public fountain, but I _cannot_ find the reference, so might well have misunderstood or misremembered. He did a lot of public works, in any case. _Don’t_ look up period Parisian sanitation; it will horrify you.
> 
> // Also also - Mazarin had a very different background to Aramis (more political experience, for one), but there were a lot of rumours flying about the affection between him and the Queen, and somehow it all worked out okay. If anyone was wondering how sustainable the Anne/Aramis HEA might be. There’s historical precedent that it worked, okay?
> 
> // The last handholding scene was suggested by DaisyNinjaGirl some time ago. Thanks!


End file.
